Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/22

JULES VERNE Brittany, on February 8, 1828. His father was a lawyer in good circumstances, and Jules' early training was also for the law. The chief pleasure of his youth lay in a battered old sailing boat, in which he and his brother Paul, taking turns at being captain, played all the stories of the sea, and explored every reach of the River Loire, even down to the mighty ocean. That sloop still echoes through his every book.

Sent to Paris to complete his studies, Jules soon drifted away from the law. He became part and parcel of all the Bohemian life of Paris, a student, artist, author, poet, clerking all day that he might live and dream and scribble all the night. A typical "son of the boulevards," they called him in those days. He became a close friend of the younger Dumas, and was introduced to his friend's yet more celebrated father, the Alexander Dumas of romance. The father guided and advised him; the son collaborated with him in his first literary success—if literary it can be called—a little one act comedy in verse, "Broken Straws," produced at the "Gymnase"' in 1850. Then came librettos for comic operas, short stories for little-known story papers; and young Verne was fairly launched upon a career of authorship.

In 1857 he journeyed eighty miles to Amiens, so the story is told, to act as best man at the xiv